In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a personal relation--a relation between the human personality and some personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him. But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human heart in which this does not seem to be the case--and that is Buddhism. The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be gods or not, at any rate there is no human personality. As in a conflagration--and according to the Buddha the whole world, burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration--the flames leap from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations the self, or rather the character, _Karman_, like a flame, leaps from one form of existence to another. The flame indeed appears to be there all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I' have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana. Thus, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other religion. The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of gods, has himself become a god to whom prayer and worship are addressed. Whether in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.